100 Years
100 Stories

All we know about the early years of Tehmi Terrace is that it was built by an engineer called Samant for a Parsi family called Barias, who named it Soona Villa. In 1943, Rustomjee Pallonjee Patel who lived with his wife, Tehmi, and daughter in a rented apartment in Grant Road, bought the 9-bedroom home from the Barias. Bandra was largely wilderness at the time with a few traditional settlements, called gaothans, dotting the landscape. “I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing” writes a concerned Rustomjee in his diary soon after.

It was indeed a risk moving his young family to this desolate suburb while Rustomjee spent most of his time in Aden on business. Heta Pandit, Rustomjee’s granddaughter, recalls how Tehmi lived alone in the bungalow for most of her life. Her husband had died within ten years of buying the house and in a couple of years her daughter got married and moved away. “She was fiercely independent”, recalls Heta. “She lived alone, loved watching Hindi movies in the theater and picked up her food from Ratan Tata Institute (RTI) on Peddar Road, herself.” Although Heta didn’t spend too much of her childhood in Tehmi Terrace, she recalls vacations at the home. “We used to stop there, stay with her for a couple of days and move on to Panchgani. On our way back to Baroda we would again halt at Tehmi Terrace.”

Tehmi Terrace embodies features from English architecture while maintaining practicalities of living in a rainy, humid city like Bombay. The flooring was encaustic cement or clay in earthy shades of red, browns and mustard yellows. After the passing on of her grandmother, Heta’s mother inherited the house from where she started a nursery, called Green Gifts. The house would go on to be known by this name. However, soon the well-maintained bungalow with ample compound space for vanity vans and generators, started to attract production houses due to its vintage appeal and convenience. Heta and her mother first gave out the bungalow in 1985 for the shoot of an ad-film for Dhaara Oil. "My mother was approached by a friend of hers who was working with an advertising firm. She wasn't quite sure at first, but then she thought - why not?!”, says Heta.

The house has had many parallel lives. A home, a nursery, a shooting spot. In the 1990s, the Minton tiles in the living room of the ground floor looked worn out and were badly damaged in some parts. A home as special as Tehmi Terrace needed Bharat Tiles’ expert touch. Dilnavaz customized the tiles to match the existing pattern. The living room got a new lease of life.

Over time the house has seen filming of movies like Kalyug, Badmaash Company, Buddha Hoga Tera Baap, Judgmental Hai Kya, 102 Not Out, and more recently the OTT series Bard of Blood. In recent times, Farhad Patel, Heta’s nephew who now handles most of the requests for shooting, says that features from O.T.T platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Sony LIV are also shot in the iconic bungalow.

The place is now undergoing another phase of renovations and once again Bharat has received the contract for a flooring that retains the vintage vibe of the house. Perhaps unbeknownst to most of the actors, directors and crew, Bharat’s floors have been quietly capturing the ongoing transformation in the entertainment industry in the city of dreams that is Mumbai.